To be honest, we didn’t have a lot in common. She didn’t have an opinion on much of anything, even the war, although she wasn’t a supporter. Nor did she express much about what she wanted to do with her life. I wasn’t sure she even knew where the Frozen North was. But she didn’t refuse when I patched together enough courage to ask her to one of our parties at Guantanamero Bay. I had undertaken an intelligence sweep, first by questioning Remi’s girlfriend Meg, as obliquely as I could, what she knew about Janey’s status. I had found out Meg knew Janey from Orange County College before both transferred over to UC Irvine in their junior year. Meg told me Janey had broken up with her boyfriend and wasn’t particularly seeing anybody. But still I dithered about asking her out until early April.
She didn’t seem like the type who would ever be interested in somebody like me whose only claim to fame was being a grad student. Yet she agreed to accompany me to the party, and I think she had an okay time. In any case, we went out twice more: once we took in a movie at the Port Theater in Corona del Mar, and another time went to Sid’s Blue Beat on the Balboa Peninsula with some other history grad students for a meal. I still couldn’t figure out whether she was interested in me or not. Our end-of-date goodbyes were pretty stiff — a hug and a peck. Maybe she was waiting for me to make the first move. Or maybe she was simply heeding that Ann Landers advice I read once. A single woman who had been invited on a date by a guy she didn’t much care for asked Ann if she should accept the invitation. “Go with the creep and look over the crop” was Ann’s suggestion, which I thought pretty cold.
I had written Janey on a slow night in the Sun newsroom as soon as I got back to Vancouver. Before I left campus I had asked for, and she’d given me, the address of her folks in Fullerton where she would be spending the summer. To my surprise, she sent a letter right back, so I wrote her again. Her letter wasn’t particularly warm, but not a brush-off, either — just sort of newsy. My second letter to her was in mid-July. Since then I’d received a postcard in August from Santa Barbara, where she had an aunt with a place near the beach that Janey visited every year. I was hoping my absence had made her heart grow fonder. But I wasn’t counting on it. Probably she’d fallen madly in love with somebody in Fullerton over the summer. As I used to tell Remi, I absorbed a ton of pleasure merely staring at Janey. If she was around the History Department again this year, I’d get more of that, even if she wasn’t inclined to continue whatever it was we had going.
I tried hard in July and August not to obsess about her. I had dared to ask out an astonishingly beautiful girl, yet didn’t know how to increase the ante, or even if she wanted me to. Maybe, given our lack so far of anything resembling a communion of souls, the question was: physical considerations aside, did I want more to happen between us? Meantime, simply picturing Janey, let alone festering about what might or might not develop, was another means to while away the miles.
I signalled, and at the risk of my life, started to ease across the various lanes of speeding vehicles to accomplish the exit to I-405. Minutes later the Volksie was roaring through the built-up areas of the San Fernando Valley, a jumble of eucalyptus and palm trees, rooftops, and surface streets lined with businesses stretching off under the freeway. Then the climb out of the valley over the green Santa Monica Mountains. And from the top of that rise, there it was, extending in the haze below in every direction farther than eye could travel or mind could imagine: El Pueblo del Rio de Nuestra Senora La Reina de Los Angeles.
My radio had picked up 93 KHJ just before we blasted over the final ridge. I knew there was no point tuning in XERB, Mighty Ten Ninety, Fifty Thousand Watts of Soul Power. The mad excitement of XERB’s DJ Wolfman Jack wouldn’t be happening till late in the evening, with his all-black-except-for-the-Stones playlist, his crazed bellows of “Haaave Mercy,” his shilling for Ziegler and Ziegler’s alligator shoes, and his abrupt termination of conversations with on-air callers via an explosive “Baaah” — his pronunciation of “Bye.” KHJ’s DJs, the Boss Jocks, were meagre fare compared to the “Woofman,” as he referred to himself. Nevertheless, the moment I crested the Santa Monicas and dropped toward Westwood, KHJ serendipitously spun The Doors’ “Break on Through to the Other Side.” The urgent drum riff kicked it off, followed by a sequence of jingly notes on electric piano, succeeded by the same run on electric guitar. Then the whole band crashed into line behind Jim Morrison’s fervent:
You know the day destroys the night,
Night divides the day.
Tried to run,
Tried to hide:
Break on through to the other side,
Break on through to the other side,
Break on through to the other side, yeah.
The Other Side was pulling out all the stops. As the cranked-up traffic on 405 accelerated deeper into the heart of L.A., visible ahead toward the ocean was an immense plume of black smoke pouring upward and spreading east. Shades of Watts: was L.A. burning? Vehicles bunched and slowed past the airport in the tail end of rush hour, and I could see the column of smoke was heavier toward El Segundo. An oil tank farm in flames? Waterborne Vietcong frogmen bringing the war home to America? KHJ was airing “In the Year 2525,” a whiny song I didn’t much care for, so I flipped around the dial, trying to pick up a news broadcast that accounted for the fire. I got some evangelical enthusiasm: “This is not our home. I say again: This is not our home.” Also chatter in Spanish, and lots of car ads. I almost rammed into a truck when I glanced up from changing the station to observe that the lane I was in had stopped moving. But I wasn’t any the wiser about the blaze.
Past Long Beach, black cloud behind me now, the freeway unclogged. When I departed the Gold Coast in June, the official estimate was that the San Diego Freeway would be pushed southward to at least MacArthur Boulevard by the end of summer. I decided to explore another day how far construction had actually reached and exited 405 where I usually did at Harbour Boulevard. After Harbour merged into Newport Boulevard, I powered down that until it teed at Pacific Coast Highway. I turned left.
The evening air was noticeably cooler by the water, and at a stop light on PCH I reached across and wound up the passenger window. I felt I should park for a moment and put on a shirt. This close to Laguna, though, I was anxious to reach my destination after the long, hot day in the saddle. I glanced up MacArthur Boulevard as I putt-putted by, thinking how after the weekend I’d be headed there to campus to reconnect with Janey, Professor Bulgy, the latest developments in SDS, and of course to start the two seminar courses I had signed up for this term. As well, I needed to check in with the university’s Information Office in case they could use me as a PR writer again this year. MacArthur Boulevard looked as it had when I left, except the four-lane was bathed in golden light from the sunset streaming between the palms and stores of Corona del Mar. At the junction of MacArthur and PCH, the Zoo Restaurant — famous for its half-pound of fries with every burger — appeared busy as ever.
Then I was out among the wheat-coloured hills of the Irvine Ranch that rolled down to greet the Pacific. To my right, the sinking sun glittered off rows of combers. Immediately before Laguna was a cove like an illustration in a travel brochure: a half-circle of house trailers set back amid palms along a wide, sandy crescent where high surf was breaking. I caught the reflected light off some boards in the water. Then I was steering by LAGUNA BEACH CITY LIMITS: pop. 12,510. Moments later I slowed to signal left onto Cajon Street, gearing into low to help the Volksie pant up the steep last fifty yards. I cut the engine by the mailbox at the top of the driveway to 283.
Clambering out of the car, I stood. The air was fragrant with citrus perfumes, thick with the sea and the moaning of doves. In the quiet spaces between the traffic rumbling along PCH, I could hear the barking of seals on the rocks at Shaw’s Cove, a few blocks below the highway.
I had found this two-storey rental cottage when I arrived at UC Irvine for my second year of grad studies. I occupied the upper floor for the school term, and in July and August the owners, who lived in Altadena, rented my apartment for as much per week as I paid per month.
The